SilverStripe Blog

Blog

My recent blog post on Backbone unit testing mentioned AngularJS, as being one of the more popular emerging JavaScript frameworks. A common use case for AngularJS is filtering lists of data such as products. I’ve put together an example application which creates a simple product catalogue and more importantly highlights the concept of AngularJS and SilverStripe working together.

Videos from the March 5th, 2014 Wellington SilverStripe developer community meetups are up on our vimeo video knowldge-base, well worth a watch!Since the talks got a bit technical, it will be good to rewatch (if you came along that night) and absorb the material again. Check them out for the first time if you didn't make it (or are on the other side of the globe). Ingo's and Stig's presentation slides are also available.

Sometimes you just need to embed something quickly in SilverStripe CMS's rich text content (depending on what you are trying to do a shortcode might be a better option!). By default SilverStripe makes a valiant effort to ensure content in this field in the CMS is cleaned up and does not contain any nasties that might break your page or even worse, allow chunks of javascript to be pasted and executed where they shouldn't be (they are better off being dealt with via the Requirements functionality - javascript is not content!).

It's well known that out of the box Content Management Systems (CMS) are often not the most high performance of systems. A vanilla installation of SilverStripe is no exception. Luckily, there are some useful tactics you can use to improve performance of your SilverStripe websites. This involves some built in features of SilverStripe itself, along with some infrastructural considerations. It all depends on your customer needs and the level of performance you require.

Image cropping in SilverStripe is pretty minimalistic. You don't crop images at all inside the CMS, you can however crop images in the SilverStripe template engine. As a SilverStripe template designer you can use the $CroppedImage(width,height) tag (among other image resizing methods) to ensure that your beautiful design isn't ruined by an image that is too tall or wide for a particular purpose or UI.

Another successful SilverStripe Meetup was held at the new SilverStripe Auckland, New Zealand offices last week (15th Jan 2014). An office warming party! There was a great turn out with SilverStripe developer regulars, new faces and those interested to learn more about our SilverStripe open-source project. Following the usual format we had a couple of speakers share their SilverStripe knowledge (including myself) and as always we captured the knowledge in full audio-visual awesomeness.

Recent advances in technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript mean complex applications can now be delivered via the Web. Building interaction-rich web applications can create new and engaging experiences for users. For developers, managing the growth of these applications can be challenging. Fortunately there's a great range of open source solutions to help us out. Some of the more popular JavaScript frameworks are Backbone, Angular, and Ember.

I have been reading a lot about 'Brain Science' (not the official term FYI) as brains are cool, and complex. And squishy.

There have been several scientific studies about creativity, and what encourages it, and there are some things that we can do for ourselves to make our brains more creative. One of the findings is that happy thoughts (and therefore dopamine that is flushed through the brain as a result of happy feelings) tend to also flush the areas that creativity is thought to be based. Thus, making us more inspired, creative and productive.